Cathodoluminescence from interlayer excitons in a 2D semiconductor heterobilayer

Photoluminescence has widely been used to study excitons in semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenide (MX₂) monolayers, demonstrating strong light-matter interactions and locked spin and valley degrees of freedom. In heterobilayers composed of overlapping monolayers of two different MX₂, an interlayer exciton can form, with the hole localised in one layer and the electron in the other. These interlayer excitons are long-lived, field-tunable, and can be trapped by moiré patterns formed at small twist angles between the layers. Here we demonstrate that emission from radiative recombination of interlayer excitons can be observed by cathodoluminescence from a WSe₂/MoSe₂heterobilayer encapsulated in hexagonal boron nitride. The higher spatial resolution of cathodoluminescence, compared to photoluminescence, allows detailed analysis of sample heterogeneity at the 100 s of nm lengthscales over which twist angles tend to vary in dry-transfer fabricated heterostructures.